I suppose Labor Day — which is a meaningless, normal Monday here in Belgium — marks the unofficial end of summer in the US. For me it’s always felt like a mixed bag, since it often includes my birthday, but also the knowledge that my days of lounging on the beach or riding my bike for five hours are numbered. When I was in grad school it was kind of the climax of the road season, with four days of tough racing at the Green Mountain Stage Race, one of the few races I really miss now that we’re in Europe.
Here in Belgium some folks celebrated the weekend with the first race of the ‘cross season in Kessel, the beginning of De Moedige Veldrijder Series (that is, The Courageous Cyclocrosser to English speakers). Though that series takes place in Vlaams-Brabant and Antwerpen, and most of the races are comparatively close to Brussels, I’ve been doing the Vlaamse Cyclocross Cup out in East and West Flanders for a few years now and am going to stick with it for the season. It’s hard enough to get to races where you can barely speak the local language, without having to worry about finding new obscure towns, learn to navigate new cow pastures, and get destroyed by new racers. So, yeah, that means that for me, the first race is a week an a half away.
This year has marked a change in several ways. First, I’m on new bikes for the first time in ages. I’ve been riding my new ‘cross bike for months now and am feeling as good on it as I ever have on any bike, and now have a sweet new road bike to go with it. My first ride was more debacle than success, when my crank fell off after about 30 km, but the second was awesome (and I’ve learned a lot about how to properly install SRAM cranks too).
I’ll save a full write-up about both bikes (and some sweet new wheels I’m testing for Cyclocross Magazine as well) for a future post.
Coming into the season I’m feeling good. I changed my training this year, putting the emphasis on quality rides and quality rest. The change paid off, all my fitness indicators and tests have been better in the past few weeks than they were at the peak of last season.
A couple of trips with some amazing riding didn’t hurt either. I rode through some of the most beautiful and attractive country, with some killer climbs, first in La Roche-en-Ardenne, where I climbed Belgium’s toughest Col (at least according to Cotacol) like 20 times, then a couple of months later in Italy.
The riding in Italy was out of this world good, with gorgeous Mediterranean countryside, tough climbs, and ancient cities everywhere. The highlight was a trip up the Blockhaus climb, a 2000 m beast in the Apennines.
Smiling, somehow, near the summit.
The Blockhaus featured prominently in the 2009 Giro d’Italia (see the link above), and was the site of cycling great Eddy Merckx’s first mountaintop win in 1967. It was my first Grand Tour climb, and I pretty much got the point after riding it. 26 km mostly at about 8%, with a brutal, blazingly hot section of about 3 km at close to 10% coming through the 1000 m mark. The mountain burned recently, so any shade you might have been afforded on this section was wiped out. And I suffered. And suffered. And then felt amazing and flew up the last several kms, which is why I’m smiling in the photo above.
The moral of this story is that, if you have the opportunity to ride on Italy’s east coast, or do any of the famous climbs of the three big tours, you should do it.
So the Blockhause and Col du Haussire and a lot of hard, hilly rides in Overijse and Rixensart and Lasne and Ittre, all paid off and here I am about a week from the start of racing season with pretty high hopes, new sponsors, and a generally good outlook.
Mindi’s getting there too, with new classes on sports psychology and some new work that I can’t talk about just yet. I’m sure she’d tell you all about it if she ever decided to deal with her woefully out-of-date blog.
Meanwhile professionals start up in the US with Starcrossed, a night race in Washington, on the same day I start here in Belgium, and the European season kicks off in Erpe-Mere. So there’s lots of news, bikes, and mud coming.
With cyclocross still about five weeks away, we’ve got to fill the time between work and training somehow. Mindi sent me this cute little video of a kid who definitely might be headed somewhere in a few years.
Actually, having just listened to this great episode of Radiolab all about what it takes to be truly great at something (featuring some discussion with Malcolm Gladwell about Outliers) this kid is totally on the right track. (It’s time to buy the little guy some pedals, though!)
Since I started covering professional cycling a couple of years ago, I’ve learned that the American notion of what goes into making a professional cyclist — a notion I shared, by the way — is just totally wrong. A lot of Americans seem to think that cyclists work their way through the ranks until they emerge at the top and head for the Tour de France.
I’m sure there are good reasons for this view of professional cycling. It does happen occasionally that a rider finds his way from enthusiast to workaday domestic pro racer, so other racers probably have seen it happen to one or two people they know and like the idea that, with just a little more time to train, it could happen to them. Pro racing is also just a world away from what the average person does on a bike. Amateurs, no doubt, like to think of themselves as in the minor leagues, but, unfortunately, this view is just wildly incorrect. The difference between the ProTour and Tour de France and your average Cat 3 race is like the difference between Major League Baseball and slow pitch softball. It’s the difference between the Olympic 5,000 m and the guy who comes in 250th at 25:30 in your average local 5k.
So people just don’t have any frame of reference for what it takes to make an Andy Schleck, Alberto Contador, or Christian Vande Velde.
Which is why I’m so amused by all the monday morning quarterbacking — or, maybe, monday afternoon directeur sportifing — after yesterday’s Stage of the Tour de France.
“Learn to shift, Andy!” someone cries! “If you mis-shift during a sprint, no one waits for you!” someone complains. “Pro riders should know how to recover from a dropped chain!” proclaims another.
Let’s start with this.
The idea that Andy Schleck doesn’t know how to shift gears or recover from a dropped chain without stopping is ludicrous. This is a man who has been racing bikes his entire life. His father raced bikes. His older brother races bikes.
Tour de France contenders do not appear out of nowhere. They train, all the time, from a young age. Every day is dedicated to training or to racing. They live at training camps where they probably spend more time in a month just practicing things like shifting and recovering from dropped chains than a lot of people spend training in a month.
When you read in Andy’s bio that he joined the amateur club VC Roubaix six years ago, don’t be confused by the word amateur and think he was some Cat 4 back then. The amateur/pro distinction means something specific here in Europe, and the amateurs of VC Roubaix all fast guys who just don’t have official pro contracts. They’d tear your legs off, have no doubt.
(Brief aside, VC Roubaix, though an amateur club, is not your average NorEast Cycling. These guys host a Cyclocross World Cup and the Espoirs Paris-Roubaix among other races. They’re a serious bike racing organization that develops high level pro cyclists. Don’t be fooled.)
I didn’t talk to Andy, and I don’t know exactly what happened to him yesterday, and I’ll spare you my boring hypothesis, but he did not just mis-shift or not know how to recover from a dropped chain. Let’s all disabuse ourselves of the notion that what happened to him is the same as what happened to that guy in your 35 mile Cat 4 race last weekend, ok? The video shows he was not shifting, and there’s little doubt that he knows how to work his bike better than you or I ever will.
The there’s the raging debate over whether Contador’s attack in the moments following Schleck’s troubles was savvy or desperate, all in the game or disgraceful. What’s my take?
First, let’s be clear. There’s no rule in cycling that says you have to stop dead when your opponent has a technical problem, or has to pull to the side of the road to take one of those beautifully euphamistic “nature breaks”. But attacking is a different story, for two reasons. And attacking is what Contador did yesterday.
So why not attack?
First, there’s the sporting reason. If Contador wins the Tour by less than about 30 seconds, his win will forever have an asterisk on it. “Contador technically won,” people will say, “but Schleck was the stronger rider and Contador took advantage of his 30 seconds of bad luck.”
And the thing of it is, Contador gained most of his time fairly, on the descent. He went over the top just a handful of seconds in front of Schleck. It’s possible he could have not attacked and still gained time on Schleck, who is not as skilled a descender. So the attack means a mostly legitimate 40 second gain will be treated by the fans as totally illegitimate, even though most of that time was earned fairly.
Of course, sportsmanship will only take you so far, and winning the Tour is important too. But some racers get remembered as great champions and others as unsporting, petulant racers who would take advantage of bad luck to win. I’d imagine that most people would prefer the first.
Jan Ullrich, after all, played the villain in the eyes of many Americans for most of Lance Armstrong’s career. But a lot of people were remembering him fondly yesterday, despite the evidence that he doped, and despite the fact that he spent his career trying to unseat the American fan favorite. That’s because he played fair, famously waiting when Armstrong crashed on Luz Ardiden only to be attacked and beaten by Armstrong moments later.
The second reason for not attacking is more pragmatic: it’s simply dangerous to piss off your opponents. Ullrich’s gesture in 2003 was payback for a similar gesture by Armstrong, who waited for his crashed opponent on the descent from the Col de Peyresourde, in 2001.
Similarly, you know that Niels Albert did not make any friends when he rode Sven Nys into the barriers in last year’s Jaarmarktcross. The fans, who had never really warmed to 2009 World Champion Albert, turned on him, and his season started to fall apart right there. And, though his public statements were fairly magnanimous, believe me, Nys did not forget about Albert’s move.
The point is, you never know when you’ll be the victim of a mishap, a mistake, technical problem, and find yourself wishing you had been a little more sporting to the guy who is now taking advantage of it. You don’t know how your ten second gain will be repaid or avenged, or what extra motivation you’ve given to the guy who already has devoted a lifetime to the singular goal of beating you in the Tour de France. You never know when the two of you will have to work together to stave off someone else’s attack. In cycling it pays to make friends.
You can argue the point if you want, but I’m not alone in my position on this. In fact, even Alberto himself seems to have realized the possible consequences of his move yesterday. Is his contrition too late?
Update: Velonews’ Lennard Zinn offers some speculation on what happened to Schleck’s chain that at least half-validates my thinking. (I think Lennard may be wrong that Andy was shifting when the problem occurred, but he knows more about bikes than I ever will, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.)
I’ve been pretty badly behind in updating my blog, although it’s not totally without reason. I’ve been on the road almost nonstop since April, first hitting the US (see the last post), then La Roche-en-Ardenne here in Belgium, then Denmark and Sweden, Switzerland, and a few other spots. And when I wasn’t traveling — and sometimes when I was — I’ve been training hard enough on the bike to have relatively little time for much else.
But I’m slowly catching up. The photos from the US trip are up on Flickr.
The trip was great, with stops in Boulder, Steamboat Springs, where we picked up bikes from my new sponsor, Moots, Topeka and Kansas City, where Mindi’s brother got married, Philly, and New England. And, of course, we had the chance to catch up with lots of family and friends we miss a lot in Europe.
Back here in Belgium I headed east to the Ardennes, where I went to some meetings and spend my evenings working out on the brutal Col du Haussire, one of the country’s most difficult climbs. By the standards of Colorado or Switzerland, it’s not so tough, but at 3.3 km with long stretches well above 10% grade, it was tough enough. Hopefully it helped my form.
Then there was Denmark and Sweden (photos coming soon), a working week in Bern, and lots and lots of bike riding here. We also caught a couple of days of the Tour de France as it made its way through Brussels. Photos from all of that are coming really soon.
In a couple of weeks Mindi and I head to Italy. First a few days of sightseeing in Rome, then a trip east where we’ll hit the beaches and do some riding the Apenines, including the Blockhaus, which should wreck my legs a little bit. The Blockhaus was famously the end of a stage of the 2009 Giro, and you can click on the link if you want a sense of what it looks like.
Yesterday marked two months until ‘cross starts for me. I’m counting down. Stay tuned…
So sitting here in a cafe in Boulder, drinking chai with Mindi and using the free wifi for a little bit, I finally got around to uploading the last photo I took from the 2009-10 season. Though I took the week off for a meeting, it’s hard not to think about racing and the upcoming season here in a town with so much bike culture and so many racers. We watched about 100 people ride up to the top of Flagstaff Mountain while we were hiking up it yesterday, and see tons of riders out on the roads everywhere we go.
I’m also thinking about racing because we head to meet with my new sponsors at Moots tomorrow, where we’ll check out their operations and pick up the bikes I’m going to race this year. I’ll have a new road and ‘cross bike to write about sometime soon.
Check back for updates on the US trip soon, the visit to Moots and the new bikes included. But for now, I leave you with a look back at the accumulated stuff of six months of racing. I was going to write a little essay about it, but I actually think the photo speaks for itself. Make sure you click through to the real Flickr photo for the whole story.
I'm Dan Seaton. This is my life as a solar physics postdoc, expat in Belgium, cyclocross racer, cyclocross magazine correspondent, and occasional mountaineer, musician, & cook.
If you came looking for information on actual bike gear ratios, as always, Sheldon has the answer.
